MMO GurL

I must be a glutton for punishment or perhaps I just like a challenge, but for better or worse, I’m a healer.

I started out long ago as a tank – in fact I tanked for all of Vanilla WOW. Come BC, I didn’t want much at all to do with tanking. Tanking dungeons on a warrior was a nightmare and I soon moved onto a DPS role. I spent most of BC playing that role until I decided to level a shaman with which I intended to help my guild out with heals. We were always missing a healer for raid nights and so I figured I’d roll one. I really enjoyed shaman healing for both raids and pvp and I spent all of Season 3 partaking in much pillar humping in arena on that same shaman.

Since then, I have played the healer role as a druid, paladin, and finally now as a priest. I played through WotLK mainly on my resto druid, but towards the end I switched to my paladin for raids as my druid took more of a PVP turn.

Suffice it to say, I never had too much of a problem healing in heroics or dungeons. Every once in a while a tank would come into random pugged heroic, and have some low health, but even than it was pretty easy. They would have to be horrible for me to actually leave the heroic in frustration. In fact, most tanks that I got paired with weren’t horrible at all, but were amazingly overpowered and could probably have survived on their own with the exception of some boss fights.

In those days, the tanks carried the group. There is no question in my mind.

Things have changed immensely with Cataclysm though and now it is hard to pick out who, if anyone, carries the group. I can tell you who suffers the most stressful part of the experience though, and that my friends, is the healer.

We are now engaged in heroics that are actually difficult. There is no more face rolling through these instances with the tank carrying everyone. You have to bring DPS that can actually do good damage. You need a well geared tank with mitigation and you need an awesome healer. In fact, I’d say if I had to pick anyone to carry the team, it is the healer. And when nobody else brings what they’re supposed to bring to the table – it is the healer who suffers.

PUG tanks are still in a rush – they expect you to never run out of mana and even though you just went through your whole 90k mana pool on one trash pool because the DPS was so bad and nobody bothered to use crowd control – they keep running on ahead. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, “If he pulls – he can die.” I am not the best geared as I just hit 85 not too long ago, but I have a 350 item level which isn’t quite chopped liver and I consider myself a damn good healer.

If I can’t keep up with these people, than something is wrong.

What’s wrong is that DPS is still expecting a carry. As soon as they hit 85 they will buy or craft some PVP blues and get their ONLY 329 prerequisite for joining a heroic. They come in not realizing or not caring that they need to be doing at least 8-10k dps to even make a dent in the heroic. If those mobs don’t die fast or aren’t Cced – than my mana pool will simply not last and we will all die.

Let me describe to you what my last heroic PUG was like. I queued with my husband, who is a mage, and also newly 85. His gear is not the greatest, but he can still push 10k, and honestly that is all that matters to me. We got sent to the Vortex Pinnacle and were paired with a warrior tank, a warlock, and a feral druid. The tank told my husband to sheep which is kind of funny considering mages can’t sheep elementals. So the tank ignores this and just pulls anyway. The pulls were so taxing on my mana that I was having to sit and drink after almost every single one. On top of that, the other dps were standing in unnecessary spells like the lightning cloud AOE.

I didn’t realize we had the lock at first and was caught up in having to play 150% to keep up. When I did, I asked him to banish one of the elementals. As soon as I did this, he left the party. Just left! God forbid he should help CC!! He was replaced with a DK who did piss poor DPS – about 6k to be specific and who also kept AFKing in the middle of fights. Somebody ended up voting to kick him, and he was replaced with yet ANOTHER DK who did 4k DPS instead of 6. This new DK spent most of the dungeon dying and in Orgrimmar (yes, he was actually just sitting in town while we did all the work). The tank ended up kicking the feral druid was at least doing 8k DPS and that guy got replaced with a bad hunter.

SOMEHOW, I made it through this nightmare and we got to the last boss with 2 DPS – 1 sitting in town – and we wiped to Assad as the hunter died at the first Supremacy of the Storm and we just couldn’t do it with 1 DPS so I eventually went OOM.

While it was a nightmare for me, it made me realize all of the flaws of the new system and how it effects healers the most. I also feel that only requiring an item level that doesn’t take into account how much actual damage the player can do is horrendously silly. Things have gone back to the way they were before random heroics where you just queue with your guild mates because they are the only ones you trust to not fail horribly.

I just wish that there were some way that these DPS could not waste everyone’s time. There is no such thing as an easy carry anymore, somebody is always going to suffer for it. I’ll be damned if that person is going to be me because I am simply not going to bash my head against the wall anymore for people I don’t know and that can’t even grant me the simple courtesy of coming to a heroic prepared (IE with some kind of concept of how to play their class and do decent DPS). There are regulars available to under-geared players and I took part in them for quite some time before I even queued for heroics!

I do like the concept of meeting new people and I’m not saying that everyone should be perfect, but they should at least be able to bring the needed DPS to clear it without overwhelming difficulty.

So is this the end of random heroics for the majority or is there some way that Blizzard can fix this?

Photo taken from one of Cynicalbrit’s wipe-a-thon videos.

On Sunday, I decided that I was going to spend the day leveling my Defiant rogue in Rift. She was level 29 to start and I didn’t get her too far into 30 before I decided to shut the client down. Why? Because I was nerd raging.

To start with, I’m leveling in a zone called Scarlet Gorge and whoever designed this zone is a masochistic bastard (sorry, but it’s true). The zone is an absolute nightmare as most of the quests I have done so far involve killing mobs that are jam packed on top of each other.

In recent zones, like Stonefield, you may have had to kill a couple at a time, but in Scarlet Gorge, you are stuck with 3 most of the time and then will most likely get a patrol that you weren’t accounting for. As a rogue, I do have a crowd control mechanism (sap) to take care of one mob, but that still leaves two which can sometimes be tricky unless I use a cool-down or a potion. If I get an extra mob into the equation, I’m screwed, and will have to run or I’ll die; in fact, even if I run, I still may die.

On top of dealing with that for about 2 hours, a major invasion occurred and the boss Gnar King (I think that was it – don’t hold me to it) showed up. I ran half way across the map for the chance to participate and after missing the big fight I ran in to help clear up the trash. I used an AOE and next thing I know I’m flagged and I see what seemed to magically appear out of nowhere: a ton of Guardians all flagged.

They chased me down all the while I was just hoping to get far enough away to stealth out. What crap!! I had to nerd rage to Twitter and then had to log out. I was just too pissed off.

It made me think, “Why do things like that get me so upset? Why do people have to nerd rage?”

I think a lot of it is because we like to think that we are all awesome in our game world and that we can’t die. Dying by a mob is annoying, but dying from another character outside of a Warfront (Instanced PVP game) is just unacceptable. Why?

Perhaps because we feel that we’ve been out-witted. That someone by default of killing us is better than us. When the reality of it is that these people are usually using sneaky methods to get us in the first place. A huge group going to a major rift invasion flagged is of course looking for trouble. It’s almost as bad as those people that would flag themselves and sit on top of your mobs just hoping that you would accidentally hit them and get flagged so they could kill you?

That is also a part of why it’s so irritating to be tricked. A player figures that they know all the tricks and when they get out-smarted it’s enough to set them off into nerd rage city.

Another thing that always gets me is that I don’t like to deal with jerks in a game that is supposed to be some kind of happy go lucky virtual world. When I first started playing MMORPGs, there were never any negative people around. Maybe 1 out of 100 would be a jerk and everyone would talk about how awful they were and why they would do such a thing.

Now it’s just a fact of MMORPG life and it’s something I still haven’t come to fully accept. It annoys me that people really do think that they aren’t dealing with real people on the other end of the line. Worst yet is that most of the time griefing is done out of boredom; I say find these people something to do!

The main reason that I have never enjoyed a PVP server is because I have two separate mindsets when I play a MMORPG: PVE AND PVP. When I’m trying to level, I don’t think about the possibility of a player ganking me and I don’t even want to. I have played multiple games on a PVP server and in the end, it just gets old! Sure you can kill people whenever you want to, but you also have to worry about them killing you – whether you feel like fighting or not.

When I go into a battleground or warfront, I’m expecting to fight! I’m ready to go and I know that it’s kill or be killed, so I don’t hesitate. That also means that obviously if I’m there, I’m in the mood to fight and am perfectly fine with dying. But, I can’t stand getting caught off guard when I’m not actually wanting to PVP.

Ultimately, the nerd rage is not cool. I’m sitting there all upset like my street credits have been ruined as a decent PVPer, when in reality, it just doesn’t matter. It’s still just a game and it can be shut off at any time. I won’t deny that it’s very hard to avoid spazzing out when frustration gets heavy. I have no problem admitting that I nerd rage. It might even be because I drink too much coffee. Still, it’s best to just try to stay calm because those little jack asses just love it when you get mad.

WHY U MAD, BRO?

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One of the biggest problems I have had in the past 2 years when trying to play ANY game is that constantly you will see in the general, zone, or trade chat, that the game is a WOW clone. I remember playing Alganon for the first time and the whole chat was filled with people trashing how similar the game was and that was all anyone could focus on. Every new game I try is called a Wow Clone. Most recently a friend of mine suggested that Allods Online was a WOW Clone, and then even when I was playing last night, someone said it in zone chat.

I think it’s time for a history lesson here kiddies. WoW was not and is not the end all be all for MMORPGs. Let’s take a look back to 1999 when Everquest Online was first released as that’s the first major MMORPG released in the format that WoW is in today. I personally never played EQ but I had friends who were quite into it and would show it to me all the time. My main fears were all the stories you’d hear of players becoming utterly obsessed and losing touch with reality, losing their jobs, commiting suicide – you get the point. BUT! Even before that Ultima Online was considered the FIRST graphical MMORPG in 1997. The only reason EQ is so well known is because it was the first majorly commercial success of it’s time.

Well this is a familiar scene.

While there are many pegs along the evolutionary road of MMORPGS, the next BIG milestones to me would be MUDs. Everquest Online came from text based RPGS called MUDs. As you can see below EverQuest derived mainly from a MUD called DikuMUD. The framework for DikuMUD formed the foundation for many other MUDs. So it was a natural step in the chain of RPGs to add a 3D GUI.

Even Wiki says it.

I wasn’t too into MUDs when they were the rage, but my husband was an avid player, programmer, and ascii art designer – so I was able to ask him some questions and he even got me started in one. MUDs have an amazing amount of features, races, classes, and exploration.

377 people online is probably more than Warhammer has.

My husband always told me about a MUD called Aftershock (which I don’t believe is up anymore) where you could be inducted into this secret society of Werewolves. As a member, you had to keep the society secret from other common players by never shape-shifting in front of them. Werewolves were also in constant war with the Vampires, but had to keep the fight private. If you disobeyed the laws of the tribe, you could be decapitated and suffer permanent player death (I.E. character gone forever). I don’t know about you – but that sure beats rep grinding for one piece of gear that will be outdated in the next patch.

Oldschool Interface of the MUD

MUDs came from tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons. These tabletop games were called Pen and Paper rpgs and started sometime in the 70′s. You had a character sheet that you would spend hours agonizing over to make sure that it was perfect before playing.  There was a Dungeon Master who would oversee the game and basically create the game environment for you. They made the rooms, the monsters, the fights, the story, everything was the DM or GM’s (GameMaster) job. Decisions and actions were dictated by rolling the dice. The DM would say,  “Roll a four sided dice against your agility,” and you would either fail or pass the roll. People would play together for a couple hours a night or more, but the actual campaign could last months.

I'm casting magic missles at the darkness!

It can easily be argued that most of the content for Dungeons and Dragons was derived from Tolkien’s work. In this bit from Wiki, it plainly says that certain monster and race names were taken and changed for marketing’s sake.

I think what it comes down to is that people are mistaking clones for the whole ‘if it’s not broke don’t fix it’ system. These are how improvements are made and it’s usually with simple things. Like think about lightbulbs – the shape changes, the filaments change, but the basic idea that the bulb should stay as a glass bulb stays the same! This is the same as interfaces being similar. How many different possibilities could there even be for a working UI? People get used to certain things and so changing UIs too drastically gives a lot of gamers system shock and they get turned off by the game. Me getting annoyed by the lack of a mini map in Allods Online is a perfect example of this. But since it was JUST a mini map missing, it wasn’t that bad. If it had been the whole interface, and skills, and who knows what else, I might not have continued to play.

In closing, if you really want to know every little bit of information dating back to before Zork on virtual MMORPGS, check out this article in its entirety. It’s pretty damn accurate and is much better than sounding like an ignorant retard when you say WOW CLONE. And for information on the history of role-playing games specifically – check this one out.

Say no to saying WoW Clone!